Faciality and Ontological Doubt in Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Photography

This essay explores Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s enigmatic amateur photography from a philosophical perspective, aiming to expose the consistency of Meatyard’s investigation of faciality and ontological doubt throughout his career. By employing the Deleuzian notion of the diagram, used to specifically analyze Francis Bacon’s and other painting practices, and showing its applicability to Meatyard’s amateur photography, I aim to reveal the complexity of Meatyard’s art and explicate their so-called Symbolist suggestiveness as well as to show how the medium-specific boundary between painting and photography is fundamentally put into question.